12 DAYS OF COOKIES: HUNGARIAN ISLER COOKIES
All the cookies you need for your Christmas Cookie boxes: Shortbread, jam and chocolate--this Austro-Hungarian treasure is the best of all worlds.
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Hello!
It’s a snowy Monday morning, and we are just a few hours on the other side of a full week of Nutcracker performances! As I’ve noted so often this week, when you’re backstage supporting sixty incredible dancers (ages 6 to 60) making magic on stage or performing in it—as my daughter Greta was— it’s like being inside a beautiful bubble. It makes it hard to return to normal life for a few days or relate to anyone who hasn’t been living in the Magical Land of Sweets. This week was beauty upon beauty, for the eyes, for the spirit, for the soul.
In times like this, I instinctively get lost in writing, research, or a lengthy recipe. The dishes, laundry, and Christmas tasks that have piled up in my absence can wait, right? Let’s keep making cookies.
First, a quick recap. Here were the first four days of our 12 Days of Cookies, plus two days (while I was deeply backstage) that get filled nicely from two Christmas favorites already on my site:
12 Days of Cookies:
Rugelach (Eastern Europe)
Butter Breton Cookies (France)
Buttery Chocolate Thumbprints (Germany, Scandinavia)
Peanut-Butter and Chocolate Cookies (America)
Crinkly Ginger Molasses Cookies (America)
These are all wonderful, delicious recipes I adore. But it gives me extreme pleasure to share this final stop on our tour of Central and Eastern Europe because it is the most meaningful to me. It hails from Austro-Hungary, and my recipe is inspired by one of the most special years in our family’s life: a season spent living and schooling in our little Hungarian village 90 miles outside of Budapest.
In Hungary, a daily treat is part of the ethos of a good life. Much like in hobbit land (as my kids like to point out), Hungarians observe several meals a day: There is breakfast, of course, but also tízórai or ten o’clock meal, ebéd or lunch, and then a break for espresso and a sweet every day around 2, to tide one over to dinner.
This afternoon's pause coincided with my daily trip to pick up Greta from 7th grade in Zirc, a charming city where all our village kids go for their upper schooling. Her school was just opposite an 840-year-old abbey, Zirc Abbey (Zirci Apátság), a Cistercian monastery founded in 1182, one of Hungary's most significant religious and cultural landmarks. In the same city square as her school and the Abby was a tiny kávézó (coffee shop) and the zöldséges (vegetable stand) where we bought our fruits and vegetables each week.
Most days, this coffee shop is where I’d stop in to get a Melange (a Viennese-style coffee of espresso, steamed milk, and milk foam, sometimes with honey) and a few Isler cookies for the kids each day. But nearly every pastry shop or even the most humble bakeries has an Isler behind the counter. Some are tiny—one-biters, as András calls them. Others are big, giant chocolate-iced Linzer-style sandwich cookies with jelly inside—often apricot but occasionally raspberry.
The chocolate glaze on the Islers was sometimes exceptional. Occasionally, it was waxier (in the prepared versions), but even those were good, owing to the crumbly linzer dough and high-quality jelly usually found inside.
On the days the kávézó or one of the many village bakeries was closed, we’d head to the variety store—a clever and common style of Jack-of-all-trades store found all over Hungary, which sells everything from Q-tips to wooden pastry brushes, metal toasters, rubber balls and garden tools—plus boxes of neatly patterned Linzer and Isler cookies in tidy, alternating rows, ready to be gobbled right up.
My version below is based on the best Linzer cookies we ate in those days. Make the chocolate dip thick and decadent. These are the best cookies to gift and serve on a platter for a party. You only need one to feel treated, though I dare you to try to stop there.
Tonight, I will travel into the city to host a Hungarian Christmas party for 30 special guests. We’ll make Paprikás Csirke (Chicken Paprikas) with whole chicken legs and oodles of flavor, and pillowy handmade dumplings on the side. We’ll graze on goose liver pate and dense ruby-red paprika sausages and drink Furmint and other premier Hungarian wines. I wish I could bring you all along, but one day, I’ll give you access to those recipes and my whole menu—it’s a good one!
In the meantime, a taste of Hungary awaits you below.
xx
Sarah
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HUNGARIAN ISLER COOKIES (Chocolate Covered Butter-And-Jam Cookies)